Inspiration may indeed be mediumship, but it is conscious; and the knowledge of the prophet instructeth him.
Even though he speak in an ecstasy, he uttereth nothing that he knoweth not."
Then followed this apostrophe to the Prophet:—
"Thou who art a prophet hast had many lives: yea, thou hast taught many nations, and hast stood before kings.
And God hath instructed thee in the years that are past, and in the former times of the earth.
By prayer, by fasting, by meditation, by painful seeking, hast thou attained that thou knowest.
There is no knowledge but by labour: there is no intuition but by experience.
I have seen thee on the hills of the East: I have followed thy steps in the wilderness: I have seen thee adore at sunrise: I have marked thy night watches in the caves of the mountains.
Thou hast attained with patience, O prophet! God hath revealed the truth to thee from within."
Thus, for the first time known to history, was given a definition of the nature and method of inspiration and prophecy, at once luminous, reasonable, and inexpugnable, to the full and final solution of this stupendous problem; and comporting with and explaining, as it did, all our own experiences, we felt that we could bear unreserved testimony to its truth. But, vast as was the addition thus made to the New Gospel of Interpretation, it did not exhaust the treasures revealed and communicated on that wondrous night; for it was followed immediately by a prophecy of the meaning of the new dispensation on which the world is entering, and of which our work is the introduction. At once Biblical in diction and character, it reached in loftiness the highest level of Biblical prophecy and inspiration, demonstrating the same world celestial and divine as the source of both. For which reason, and the crushing blow administered by it to the superstitions which have made of Christianity a by-word and a reproach by their gross materialisations of mysteries purely spiritual, it is reproduced in full here. The heading is of our own devising:—